Learning a new language is no easy feat, especially in adulthood when our brains are no longer as plastic as they once were. However, speaking a second (or even third) language has the potential to unlock career opportunities you may never otherwise have gotten.
From business travel, to pay increases, to perceived intelligence amongst colleagues, being bilingual offers numerous career benefits. In this guide, we explore some of the reasons why learning a foreign language may make sense for you from a career perspective.
Learning a foreign language offers more job opportunities at home and abroad
There is no doubt that if you speak multiple languages, you will have more job opportunities, plain and simple. For example, consider countries with more than one official language, such as Canada and South Africa.
By speaking both of your country’s primary languages, you immediately open yourself up to double the number of job opportunities. Or another way of looking at it is that by only speaking one language, you’re foreclosing yourself from half of your home country’s jobs.
Similarly, in countries where there is only one official language, yet multiple languages are spoken, opportunities abound for bilingual individuals.
Take the United States, for example. Though English is the dominant language in the US, Spanish is spoken by more than 37 million people. There are millions of jobs that require Spanish fluency, including jobs in retail, customer service, healthcare, and more.
Additionally, by learning to speak another language, you can open the door to career opportunities abroad. In essence, when you are multilingual, you can apprise yourself of any job in the world, so long as immigration is a possibility.
In short, the ability to speak more languages equates to more job opportunities.
Unlock opportunities internally at your current company
All else being equal, a multilingual employee is more valuable than a monolingual employee, especially for organizations with international operations. This is true for several reasons.
Employees that can speak the native language of a country where a company does business have an immediate leg up on colleagues in terms of getting to attend business trips. For example, say your company needs to send someone from your team to Paris to help negotiate a business deal. You took the time to learn to speak French and your peers did not. Who do you think they will send?
This in turn unlocks further opportunities. Being able to travel alongside company executives and mingle with them during non-business hours on an international business trip may provide invaluable benefits which your monolingual colleague will never see.
Not to mention, your ability to speak multiple languages may eliminate the need for third-party translators. Interpreters can cost more than $100/per hour, and they often fail to provide context or underlying meaning behind a statement.
By contrast, as an employee with knowledge of your company’s business and the goals of the negotiations, you might provide a fuller picture of the discussion taking place in a foreign language. In other words, interpreters don’t always pick up on everything, meaning in-house translation saves money and provides better service, making you more valuable.
Lastly, for customer-facing companies with operations in multilingual countries, multilingual staff become increasingly important. Oftentimes, customers don’t speak the country's primary language, making customer support difficult. If you are able to speak both of your country’s languages with ease, you offer tremendous value to the customer- and vendor-facing operations.
Perceived intelligence from learning a foreign language
A lesser-known, but important benefit of speaking multiple languages is your colleagues’ perception of your intelligence and skill. People who speak multiple languages often get respect amongst colleagues, particularly in countries that are predominantly monolingual.
This is especially true among peers who have tried themselves to learn a second language but failed. They will have admiration for your mental bandwidth, and if your manager is among those impressed by your abilities, all the better.
Learning a new language offers cognitive benefits
Numerous studies over the years have shown that those who can speak a second or third language have improved cognitive abilities over their monolingual counterparts. This is especially true for those that learn their second language later in life.
Learning a new language is like exercise for your mind. You have to exert mental energy to remember new vocabulary, understand complex sentence structures, and string together new ideas. In this sense, learning a new language is like training your brain as if it were a muscle.
And as you might imagine, a well-trained, strong brain offers cognitive advantages. Bilinguals typically have improved recall and sharper mental acuity than those that have never bothered to learn a second language.
This in turn offers career benefits. Obviously, if your mind is sharper than a colleague’s, you are more likely to perform better. Similarly, it has been shown that bilinguals are better multitaskers. And in an era where productivity is constantly measured and reviewed, this is critical.
Conclusion
The bottom line is that learning a second language can open numerous doors in your career. From more job opportunities available to you at home and abroad to improved chances of being invited on an international business trip, to be used as an interpreter in one capacity or another, you can make yourself more valuable in numerous ways. Plus, the cognitive benefits that flow from being bilingual indirectly improve your productivity and work product. For one reason or another, becoming multilingual is worth every ounce of energy.